R-28 · GRAVITY LOCK
LIVEFounding Forward Deployed Engineer, Gravity Lock
Weeks inside the partner's business, writing code in their environment, graded on whether they grew.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · HYBRID · EMBEDDED ON PARTNER SITES · TRAVEL FUNDED
OPENINGS
2
2 of them, and we will take both if both are right.
BASE SALARY
£200,000 to £360,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.40% to 0.95% of Gravity Lock
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Gravity Lock enters at the point of least friction: a site that actually converts, at no cost. Then ordering, then the app, then inventory, staffing, forecasting, and the automation that takes salaried roles off the payroll and hands them back as margin. Every rung is independently worth its price.
A forward deployed engineer takes one partner up that ladder. That means being physically in the business often enough to see the process nobody documented, and technical enough to remove it that week rather than scoping it for next quarter. Gravity Lock is also the distribution arm of the group, so what you deploy is Continuum, Scaley and eventually RACD, not a bespoke agency build.
More on the company itself: Gravity Lock →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first week is spent in a partner's business rather than in a codebase. Watch how the orders actually arrive, where the paper is, who stays late and why. By the end of it you should be able to name the single process costing them the most, in pounds.
A normal Tuesday might be in their office, in their warehouse, or at your desk. Build in the morning, show it to the person who has to use it in the afternoon, change it before you leave. Once a fortnight you take something you built for one partner and make it general enough to belong in the product, which is the part of this job that compounds.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Whatever the partner already runs, plus the group's own: Continuum for coordination, Scaley for hosting, TypeScript and Postgres more often than not. Range matters far more here than depth in any single thing, and you will meet software older than you are.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
One partner
Yours, from the free wedge upward. You will know their margins.
02
The build
Written in their environment, against their reality, this week.
03
The ladder
Which rung comes next, and the case for why it pays for itself.
04
Generalisation
What you built for one partner goes back into the product. That is the measure.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have built software sitting next to the person who needed it, and you prefer working that way
- ▸Range and speed: schema, service, interface and runbook in the same week, in whatever the partner already runs
- ▸Commercial instinct. You cost the problem out before you scope the ticket
- ▸You are genuinely willing to travel and to spend weeks at a time on a partner's site
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Consulting, agency or solutions engineering, provided you were the one writing the code
- ▸You have worked with businesses that are not technology businesses, and can talk to them
- ▸Experience turning a bespoke build into a product feature
- ▸A second language, because the partner base is not only in the UK
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£200,000 to £360,000 base, plus 0.40% to 0.95% of Gravity Lock, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.